The architecture of a privacy-aware access control decision component

Today many interactions are carried out online through Web sites and e-services and often private and/or sensitive information is required by service providers. A growing concern related to this widespread diffusion of on-line applications that collect personal information is that users’ privacy is often poorly managed and sometimes abused. For instance, it is well known how personal information is often disclosed to third parties without the consent of legitimate data owners or that there are professional services specialized on gathering and correlating data from heterogeneous repositories, which permit to build user profiles and possibly to disclose sensitive information not voluntarily released by their owners. For these reasons, it has gained great importance to design systems able to fully preserve information privacy by managing in a trustworthy and responsible way all identity and profile information. In this paper, we investigate some problems concerning identity management for e-services and present the architecture of the Access Control Decision Function, a software component in charge of managing access request in a privacy-aware fashion. The content of this paper is a result of our ongoing activity in the framework of the PRIME project (Privacy and Identity Management for Europe) [18], funded by the European Commission, whose objective is the development of privacy-aware solutions for enforcing security.